Bank-paper issues meanwhile expanded by the billion.

The great contest in Germany is to maintain this bank metal reserve, and it is the task of Sisyphus and of herculean proportions.  Outside of the United States, Germany has probably little, if any, credit to-day.  She must pay in gold for what she buys from without, and from without she must get copper and oil.  Lubricating oils are troubling her now quite as much as diminishing supplies of gasolene.

To get copper for munitions of war she can produce within her own borders 90,000,000 pounds.  Of late years she has been importing from America 300,000,000 pounds per annum, so that electrification has been going on for many years all over Germany, and copper wires in telegraph-postoffice work scintillate in the skyline of the German cities.  These can come down and be replaced with iron or aluminum.  Of course, the first wires to come down will be the power-transmission wires.  They can readily be replaced with aluminum, of which Germany is the parent producer.  A very fair telephone service can be maintained with iron wires.  Those who are looking for the exhaustion of Germany on a copper basis are reckoning without knowledge of German resources.

For petrol she can substitute benzol and alcohol, with some inconvenience.  Germany is likewise the home and center of industrial alcohol, which it manufactures from surplus products.  But when it comes to gold, there is the rub.  Germany fixes a price of 20 cents a pound for copper within her own borders, but the government will pay 30 cents a pound to anybody who will deliver it to her from the outside.  Indeed, I have heard of one lot of copper in Sweden for which 40 cents a pound was bid if the parties could ship it out across the Baltic.

I have a friend who was bid $5 a gallon for gasolene if he would land it within Germany, but such bids are not necessarily convincing.  They may be made to fool the enemy.  There are also stories of great underground storage-tanks of petroleum, owned by the government and concealed in the Black Forest, that have never yet been touched.  It is inconceivable that Germany should plunge into a great war without having resources of copper and petroleum.  But for all that is bought from without she must pay gold.  No financiers know better the value of gold as the underpinning in finance than do the Germans.

Germany was very lavish with her gold at the start, and the French believed that it was an assistance in her military strategy.  At the battle of Charleroi 50,000 German cavalry screened an unsuspected infantry force of 300,000 men and the French had to retreat; but that Maubeuge surrendered 40,000 men, without more fighting, gives rise in the French mind to suspicions of German gold.  The anathemas of the French against their commander at Maubeuge make it much safer for him to remain a prisoner in Germany.  The French caught one German wearing a French uniform but having upon his person one million francs.  Of course, they shot him as a spy, but they were more incensed by the bribes he carried than by his uniform.